Wolf Hunt

by Paige Tyler

  Trevor supposed hating shifters was sociably acceptable now that John Loughlin, the former director of the DCO and de facto champion of the organization’s shifter program, had been killed when a bomb had exploded in his office.

  The day John had died, everything had changed. Now the covert intelligence organization the man had spent more than a decade building from the ground up was quickly falling apart from the inside out.

  One look around the cafeteria proved that. It was lunchtime, yet you’d never know it from the handful of people scattered around the room shoving food in their faces as if they couldn’t wait to be somewhere else. The place used to be filled with agents, analysts, and other support personnel at this time of day. While there’d always been some who were antishifter in the DCO, their numbers had been more than offset by those who realized the good that people like Trevor and his kind brought to the organization.

  Somehow, John had perfected the concept of pairing shifters with highly trained covert operatives. People had said it would never work, that shifters were little more than animals and couldn’t be trusted to work in a team environment, much less be given missions critical to national defense. John had proven the doubters wrong, fielding teams that had accomplished things that should have been impossible.

  But John’s death had led to a complete change at the top of the organization, and the new regime was blatant in their opposition to all things shifter. These days, there were probably half as many people working for the DCO as there had been a month ago. Trevor couldn’t blame them. Why stay when Dick’s first act had been to announce that the very shifters John had trusted had conspired to murder him? There hadn’t been any proof of course, but then again, when had that bastard Dick ever let something like proof get in the way of what he wanted? Hell, he’d barely let John’s seat get cold before sitting in it.

  Trevor seriously doubted that anyone with an ounce of intelligence believed any of the supposedly rogue DCO agents had been involved in John’s death. But when those twelve men and women who formed the backbone of John’s shifter program had gone on the run within hours of his murder, people either accepted they were guilty as charged or smart enough to know they’d never be able to prove their innocence before they were eliminated.

  Either way, lots of good agents had read the writing on the wall and bailed. The moment they were gone, Dick had filled their positions with trigger pullers who spent most of their time chasing the rogue shifters or sitting on their asses.

  It made Trevor wonder what the hell he was still doing there.

  Trevor was still contemplating that—and whether to get another hot dog—when two men walked into the cafeteria and immediately headed for his table. Considering there was a twenty-foot-deep buffer zone of empty tables around Trevor, that might have put him on guard, but since they were among the few friends he had at the DCO, he turned his attention to the plate of french fries just begging to be eaten as Jake Basso and Jaxson West slid out a couple of chairs and joined him.

  “Not a good idea for you guys to be seen with me,” Trevor said between bites. “Not only could it be hazardous to your career, but it might just end up getting you killed.”

  Jake, a former Navy SEAL and technically still a member of Trevor’s counterintelligence/counterespionage team, reached over and snagged a fry off the pile with a laugh. Since Trevor’s team had essentially been disbanded, Jake wasn’t anything but a good friend and coworker now.

  “What career?” Jake asked. He was a big guy with dark-blond hair, blue eyes, and a slightly crooked nose thanks to a fight he’d gotten into in high school. “I haven’t done anything but clean weapons at the firing range since everything went to hell around here. I think I’d appreciate someone trying to kill me just to relieve the boredom.”

  Yeah, Trevor guessed Jake’s career was already shot. Thanks to him. Something else for Trevor to feel crappy about. But Jake was damn good at his job, and his SEAL background would ensure that he’d land on his feet, even if he wasn’t likely to use anyone around here as a reference on his résumé.

  Jaxson West, on the other hand, was kind of screwed. As the DCO’s head of security, he’d answered directly to John when it came to securing both the training facility here on the back side of Quantico as well as the main DCO offices in downtown DC. Given that his boss had been assassinated on his watch—and that Dick hated his guts—Jaxson was in serious trouble. Dick would see that the man was blackballed in the covert community just because he could. But looking at the big, dark-haired guy sitting there so relaxed, you’d be hard-pressed to know the man was counting the days to unemployment.

  “You hear anything from Lucy?” Trevor asked.

  Jaxson grabbed a handful of fries. “No. But then again, I never expected to. The only reason she stayed at the DCO was because of John. With him gone, there’s nothing to keep her here.”

  Even though he tried to cover it up, Trevor knew Jaxson was hurt that Lucy had walked away from the DCO without ever saying a word to him. He’d been closer to Lucy Kwan, the feline shifter that John had found in China, than anyone—except maybe John, of course. Trevor had always assumed Jaxson and Lucy would end up together.

  Who knew? Maybe she’d come back someday. It wasn’t like she had to worry about anyone trying to hang the traitor label on her. No one in the organization, not even Dick, would be dumb enough to accuse the petite Asian woman of anything. While she might look like the sweetest angel ever, she was the most cold-blooded, ruthless killer the DCO had ever employed. And that was saying a lot, considering the kind of people the organization had associated with over the years.

  “You should have gotten more fries,” Jake pointed out as he snatched up the last half dozen or so in one big hand.

  Trevor chuckled. “If you’d told me you’d be joining me for lunch, I would have.”

  Jake shrugged. “I wasn’t planning on it. Jaxson and I were heading down to the pistol range to burn off a little stress when one of Dick’s new muscle-headed asshats walked past us muttering about the damn freaky shifter in the cafeteria. Since there are only three of you guys still hanging around and the others are too new to possess the ability to piss people off quite like you, we figured we’d stop in and say hi.”

  “That was mighty kind of you,” Trevor said. “I think.”

  “You haven’t heard from Ed since I talked to you last, have you?” Jake asked.

  Trevor frowned at the name. Ed Vincent, a former Air Force Pararescue, had been the first man John had teamed up with Trevor when he’d come to work at the DCO eight years ago. Jake had joined them a little while later, and since then, the three of them had traveled the world, covering each other’s backs more times than Trevor could count. When John had been murdered, Ed had up and left without saying anything to anyone, not even Trevor and Jake. Clearly, Ed hadn’t been as tight with him and Jake as Trevor had thought.

  “Nah, I haven’t heard from him,” Trevor said. “Maybe once he gets settled.”

  Jake nodded but looked doubtful. “Maybe. How about Tate Evers? He and his guys have been gone for weeks.”

  “He called about a week ago from a little town just inside the Panamanian border called Cerro Punta,” Trevor said. “Dick has them down there scouring the jungles of Costa Rica and Panama, chasing down rumors about hybrids that might have survived the fighting back in November.”

  Jaxson shook his head. “Hunting for hybrids in the middle of the jungle without a shifter to help them track is insane. It will take months.”

  No kidding. Hybrids were man-made versions of shifters, and the ones the DCO had fought with down in Costa Rica had been almost rabid. That was what happened when people tried to use science to create something rare and unique.

  “I think that’s the idea.” Trevor picked up his bottle of Gatorade and took a swig. “The real DCO teams are out chasing ghosts so they won’t get in the way of the so-
called investigation into John’s murder.”

  Jake snorted. “Dick has to know those idiots he has gallivanting all over the globe earning frequent flyer miles have no chance in hell of catching a shifter.”

  “True that,” Trevor said.

  Thank God.

  Not that Dick was truly the one giving Tate’s team or any others their orders. The person really pulling the strings was Thomas Thorn.

  Since its inception, the DCO had been run from behind the scenes by a shadowy group called the Committee, a nebulous collection of eight current and former House and Senate elites who’d held powerful positions on their respective intelligence panels. While nothing had officially changed within the Committee’s structure, John’s death had scared most of them so much that they’d gladly ceded most, if not all, of their authority to one of their members—Thomas Thorn. Which was a mistake, since Thorn was almost certainly the man who’d had John killed.

  “You want to head down to the range and punch a few holes in some targets?” Jake asked. “You can imagine it’s Dick if it helps.”

  Trevor chuckled. “Sounds like fun, but Dick asked me to meet him”—he glanced down at his watch—“nearly thirty minutes ago. I guess I should probably get over there before he decides to go ahead and just fire me already.”

  Neither of his friends laughed.

  “What if he does?” Jake asked. “I mean, I don’t understand why the hell you’re even still working at the DCO. You could walk into the Defense Intel Agency Headquarters at Anacostia-Bolling and walk out with a great job within minutes. Why the hell would you want to hang around this joint and get treated like crap?”

  Trevor had asked himself that more than a few times. Pushing back his chair, he stood and picked up his tray.

  “It’s complicated,” was all he said.

  * * *

  The minute Trevor walked into the main DCO administration building and saw the memorial plaque with John’s name, as well as his secretary Olivia’s, on it, he remembered exactly why he stayed and put up with Dick’s and Thorn’s bullshit. Contrary to what he’d told Jake and Jaxson in the cafeteria, it wasn’t complicated at all.

  He could have bailed the moment he’d heard John was dead. He’d been up in Maine, dealing with some demented doctors who’d been trying to create hybrids of their own, and it would have been easy to jump the border into Canada and disappear.

  Feline shifter Ivy Halliwell and her husband/partner, Landon Donovan, had wanted him to go into hiding with them, and he’d been tempted. He was smart enough to know what life at the DCO would be like without John there. But in the end, he’d wanted to come back and get the son of a bitch who’d killed John. He’d liked and respected John. It was the least he could do for the man.

  Admittedly, coming back had been risky. Dick could easily have labeled Trevor one of the conspirators and tossed him in some supermax prison, never to be seen again. Hell, Dick could have had him executed, and no one would ever have known that, either.

  Trevor only hoped that Dick wouldn’t realize how closely Trevor was aligned with Ivy and Landon. Outside of one mission in Tajikistan, they’d never officially worked together, so it was possible he might not. Crazy, but possible. Ivy and Landon hadn’t liked the idea of Trevor staying but said they’d help him any way they could.

  “If you even think Dick or Thorn are onto you, promise you’ll run, okay?” Ivy had said before she and Landon had gone on the run.

  Since then, all communications had been handled through burner phones, code words on various chat loops, and trusted messengers. It wasn’t the same as being able to talk face-to-face, but it was good enough.

  As he strode down the hall, Trevor marveled at how quickly the bombed-out part of the building had been repaired. He couldn’t even smell the smoke residue anymore over the scent of fresh drywall, paint, and carpeting. No one would ever know a bomb had taken out the whole middle section of the first floor and part of the second right above it.

  For a man who’d sworn up and down that he wanted to catch John’s killers, Dick had been damn quick when it came to destroying any evidence of the bombing. The new director had had the entire damaged section of the building demolished and removed within days of the murder. Fortunately, Trevor had slipped into the smoking ruins that first night, fresh off the flight from Maine, when the heat had still been so bad it’d melted his boots and burned his hands. But he’d found more than two dozen pieces of the bomb, so it had been worth it.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t known what to do with them right away. Normally, he would have turned them over to the DCO analysts and tech people and let them do their magic. But most of the ones he trusted had left, and the ones who’d stayed freely admitted they had no skill when it came to bomb and explosive forensics.

  Because Dick had so many people watching Trevor, it had taken almost a week to get a message to Ivy and Landon, letting them know what he needed. They’d given him the name of Danica’s former FBI partner in Sacramento, Tony Moretti.

  Trevor had never met the man, but Danica and the others trusted him, so that meant he would, too. But with people watching him, it had taken another week to get everything packaged up and sent out there. Since then, he’d been waiting to see if the FBI labs could come up with anything. He wasn’t expecting much. It wasn’t like Thorn was an idiot. He wasn’t likely to hire a bomb maker who’d be dumb enough to leave any solid clues behind. Moreover, Tony would have to get the bomb remains evaluated without tipping off anyone as to where the bombing had occurred. They simply couldn’t risk word of the investigation getting back to Thorn or Dick.

  While he waited, Trevor had been trying to find the bomber another way. DCO training officer Skye Durant and intel analyst Evan Lloyd were helping, but it was slow, excruciating work. He had things he could be out there doing, leads he could be checking out, but he couldn’t, not when he was under constant surveillance. He would have asked Jake and Jaxson for help, but he didn’t want to put any more people in danger than absolutely necessary.

  Sighing, Trevor walked into the outer waiting area of the newly renovated director’s office. The monstrously large desk his secretary, Phyllis, was sitting behind probably cost more than John’s entire suite of furniture from the old office. There were paintings on the wall that looked like original pieces from the early colonial years, and the coffee machine set up along the side wall looked like something you might need an engineering degree to use.

  Phyllis glanced up from her computer. Nearly sixty, she had short, curly gray hair and a thin, almost beaklike nose, on which a pair of half-moon reading glasses were perched.

  He grinned at her. “I’m here to see Dick.”

  The woman didn’t return his smile. Now that he thought about it, Trevor wasn’t sure the woman knew how to smile. If so, she’d certainly never done it around him. He was pretty sure Dick’s secretary didn’t think much of him, though whether it was because he was a shifter or a smart-ass, he didn’t know. He preferred to think it was his animal nature. He didn’t mind being looked down on because he sometimes had claws and fangs. He’d been born that way and couldn’t do anything about it. But his wit? That had taken him years of hard work to develop. He hated to think the effort had been wasted.

  “Director Coleman is expecting you. And has been for nearly thirty minutes,” she said scathingly.

  “Great! So I guess that means I can just let myself right in.”

  The older woman didn’t seem amused by that. Then again, Phyllis never seemed amused. Or angry. Or alive, for that matter. Maybe she suffered from a perpetual case of resting bitch face.

  “You most certainly will not. I’ll announce you,” she said in a tone that suggested she considered him somehow unworthy of that honor.

  He smiled even broader. “Well, how about that? I’ve never been announced before. I mean, sure, they announced my number all the time bac
k in prison, but that’s not the same thing, you know?”

  He was hoping to at least get a disdainful glower out of her, but not even that comment could crack her bland facade.

  Good sarcasm was simply wasted on some people.

  Getting to her feet, Phyllis came around the desk and led the way to Dick’s office. She knocked once, then stuck her head in and told her boss Trevor was there. A moment later, she opened the door and motioned him in.

  “Announcing someone would be more dramatic if you had a big staff you could thump on the floor a few times,” he pointed out, unable to resist poking her one more time. “You know, kind of like they do in Renaissance festivals?”

  Phyllis stood there holding the door open, regarding him with absolutely no expression.

  “Nothing?” Trevor shook his head. “I’m standing here working it, and you’re just going to leave me hanging like that?”

  Phyllis arched a brow. Damn, the woman was tough.

  Giving up, Trevor walked past her into the office. He barely made it through the door before Phyllis closed it. He supposed he could consider that a small victory. He might actually get a rise out of her at some point.

  Thanks to a keen sense of smell, Trevor knew there were three people in the office before he got inside—Dick, Thorn, and some woman he’d never seen before. He was interested in who the new woman was, what Dick wanted to talk to him about, and why Thorn was there, but he chose to ignore them all for the time being as he took a moment to appreciate all the changes Dick had made to the director’s office.

  Okay, appreciate was probably the wrong word. Trevor was never one to appreciate gaudy displays of excess, and that’s what Dick was all about.

  The first thing that struck him was that it was bigger than before. Actually, it was nearly three times the size of John’s old office. Like the outer room, this part of the renovation had come with loads of pricey furniture and over-the-top artwork. Based on the framed paintings mounted on the wall, people might think Dick had an obsession with dead white guys painted in dramatic poses. Two presidents, a general in battlefield garb, an arrogant-looking man sitting behind a big desk, and a sailor standing in a small boat holding an old-fashioned harpoon. Obviously, Dick wasn’t a big fan of landscapes.